Sometimes despairing, sometimes blackly humorous, always engrossing and thoroughly original. A wonderful debut.
Dermansky’s first novel embraces and transcends the coming of age genre by overlapping the stories of twin sisters.
Adolescent twins Sue and seconds-older Chloe must pull away from each other, at least temporarily, before they can grow up. Cute blonde, identical daughters of workaholic, largely absent parents, they have spent their childhoods dependent on each other while ignoring their kindly older brother Daniel. At 13, Sue, smaller and less personable, goes to desperate lengths, including bulimia and tattoos, to hang on to her special twin relationship with Chloe. But Chloe, seemingly better adjusted, yearns to create an independent, more conventional life. Chloe becomes friends with popular, sexually predatory Lisa Markman, whose father is a retired basketball star. Angry and jealous, Sue breaks Lisa’s nose and bullies Chloe unmercifully through ninth grade. At fourteen, as their parents separate and drift even further out of their lives and Daniel heads off to college, Chloe begins to play basketball under Mr. Markman’s guidance. Jealous of both friend and father, Lisa shifts her allegiance to Sue who takes on a rebel outlaw identity in sharp contrast to Chloe’s jock persona. But then another shift occurs when Sue runs away to stay with Daniel’s college girlfriend. Befriended by the mysterious, beneficent Smita, Sue blooms into a healthy, creative high school senior. At home alone, cut off from Mr. Markman’s benign and fatherly support by her own father’s legal threats, Chloe begins to slide into Sue’s old identity. She quits basketball, takes a slacker boyfriend and nearly self-destructs until Sue reaches out. Chloe returns to basketball and both girls are able to see themselves more clearly together and apart. Dermansky gives her misfits real dignity and avoids psycho-social clichés—even the screwy parents are oddly believable—while she neatly captures the girls’ suburban high school world with every telling detail.
Sometimes despairing, sometimes blackly humorous, always engrossing and thoroughly original. A wonderful debut.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-075978-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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